A place to discuss the meeting of theory and practice on evolving virtual communities. By Aldo de Moor (you should follow me on twitter here)

Collaborative Concept Mapping (1)

So far, I have mainly introduced thoughts and theories related to community evolution. However, the new year is a good time to start sharing some of my (dirty) hands-on process experience of making these communities work in practice.

One of the important processes in community building is collaborative sense making. This helps community members to develop the conceptual common ground on which they can build successful collaboration. I have tried many mind mapping, conceptual modeling and other concept mapping tools, but not many of them have really stuck so far. One application that I have been using to my great satisfaction for many years is MindManager. I especially use it to organize my research notes and to draft papers. However, for collaborative purposes it is less suitable, first of all because it is expensive, and second because it uses a tree or taxonomy as its basic knowledge representation metaphor, whereas real concept mapping requires the power of full semantic networks, which use graphs as their basic representation.

I was therefore very excited to learn about the CmapTools developed by IHMC, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition affiliated with the University of West Florida. The Cmap tools are free for anybody to download and use. What really makes them very useful for community building is not only their many functionalities to build concept maps, but also their strong support for collaborative editing and publishing of maps. Public Cmap servers allow communities to make maps available with various rights for accessing, annotating, and modification. Maps can be edited concurrently, compared , linked to each other and other resources on the Web, and so on. In short, Cmaps plus their servers deserve to become an important enabling knowledge infrastructure for communities of practice.

In future posts, I will report on my experiences with trying to apply CmapTools for one of the research communities I am involved in, the Conceptual Graphs community. In the over 20 years of its existence, a lot of very good research has been done on the theory and application of this powerful knowledge representation formalism. However, one complaint is that the research results are scattered and hard to access. As a community, we have decided to experiment with CmapTools to see if it can help facilitate our research process. To be continued.

Comments

I really like the CmapTools at first sight. The possibilities of this tool exceed those of Mindmanager quite convincingly (although the strength of MM is of course its simplicity). Many thanks for the link.

We are intending probably to use MindManager and CMaps even FreeMind for roadmapping. What do you think ? Should be possible ? What other tools including powerfull visualisation should be more appropriate?

Thank you anyway,
Irina Neaga
on behalf of European Union Research Group at Loughborough University, United Kingdom

For initial roadmappîng I would use simple, taxonomical mindmap tools like FreeMind, or, if you have it, MindManager. CMaps should come in handy if you are more into analyzing concepts and relations in a particular domain, and little about the structure of your semantics is known yet. Otherwise, CMaps may be overkill, since it requires a considerable learning curve to understand how it all works and get the implementation details sorted out.

Books

Tim Guest: Second LivesA fascinating collection of stories of the author visiting people who really live in Second Life and other virtual worlds. The book avoids technical how-to or talk evangelical hallelujah gospel. Instead, it gives a balanced view of both the amazing potential and dangerous pitffals of virtual worlds.